Scoring Popularity in GitHub
This study addresses the need for better popularity metrics on social coding platforms like GitHub, which is incremental as it builds on existing indicators without introducing a new paradigm.
The paper tackled the problem of measuring popularity on GitHub by analyzing three engagement metrics (forking, watching, and starring) and introduced a weight-based popularity score (WTPS) derived from historical data, but did not report concrete numerical results.
Popularity and engagement are the currencies of social media platforms, serving as powerful reinforcement mechanisms to keep users online. Social coding platforms such as GitHub serve a dual purpose: they are practical tools that facilitate asynchronous, distributed collaborations between software developers while also supporting passive social media style interactions. There are several mechanisms for "liking" content on GitHub: 1) forking repositories to copy their content 2) watching repositories to be notified of updates and 3) starring to express approval. This paper presents a study of popularity in GitHub and examines the relationship between these three quantitative measures of popularity. We introduce a weight-based popularity score (WTPS) that is extracted from the history line of other popularity indicators.